How to earn money from Freelancing: Introduction
Freelancing means having divergent jobs or short-term assignments or contracts with various companies, websites, organizations, etc., without any long-term contract.
The Internet has greatly broadcast opportunities to earn money working as a freelancer.
Approximately 10.3 million Americans work for themselves, a number that is expected to increase in the future.
Freelancing can be freeing, as the name recommends, as well as empowering and challenging.
Table of Contents
What is freelancing?
Freelancing means doing guaranteed work for multiple clients and companies remotely.
A freelancer is a self-employed person who caters services to clients, and often to multiple clients at a time.
These services are usually rendered to businesses, through the use of utility and task execution tools.
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Nearly every kind of service needed by most businesses could be provided by a freelancer, comprising marketing, publicity, advertising, technological support
(such as web programming), creative works such as graphic design, and financial support like bookkeeping.
To Become a Freelancer, Follow these steps.
Decide on your craft.
Decide what freelance work you are devoted to doing. Freelancing jobs are as deep as the workforce, and you need to regulate what it is you want to do before you can begin to do it.
View your skills as beneficial resources that are worth charging and receiving pay for.
- It is however important to know that you do not need to fear expanding your area of focus as a freelancer.
Many freelancers start doing something and through the journey of freelancing, they discover that they are the finest and love something entirely different.
Know that you can always adjust no matter what.
- Reflect on what you’re well-being. Just about every kind of skill can be turned into a freelancing opportunity.
Keep in mind that your “secondary” skills, like researching and writing, for illustration, can be just as useful as a specific set of skills different from a profession (e.g., graphic designer or computer programming).
If you know you’re a capable writer, then you could establish a freelance writing business.
- It’s very easy to believe that you don’t have the necessary skills or experience, but you need very little experience to get started freelancing.
- Instead, believe in your guts and focus on producing good work.
Create a brand.
To get your freelancing operation off the ground and become lucrative you need to think about how you will market yourself and your products and work as well. This is known as branding. You need to construct a brand for your what you’re selling and how it sets you apart from the competition – this is your identity and combine your website; logo; tagline; blog; and social media accounts; among other appearances.
- Your brand should communicate what you do that is appropriate and what you offer that is worth buying. Try to narrow your focus to a particular industry.
For example, if you determine you want to do freelance writing, you might only conclude to write for online travel sites and businesses and thus be a freelance travel writer.
Or you might decide you want to write for business and amalgamated websites.
Specializing within the field (in this case, the very broad field of writing) will make you more alluring to potential clients because it shows you have a particular rather than a universal set of skills, also known as a niche.
Build a portfolio showcasing your work.
A lot of potential clients are less excited about your specific qualifications than about your demonstrated ability to do the job.
They want to see fragments of your work and decide whether you’re a good fit for their particular project.
So building a stable portfolio of your work (samples as well as past projects) is key to building your business and in fact, you shouldn’t dispatch your freelancing business until you have this portfolio.
Include as well ovation of people and organizations whom you’ve worked with. Reading glowing reviews will help improve your profile among prospective clients.
- Generating resignation for your portfolio takes time and resources.
If you have no paid assignments or previous tasks to put in a portfolio, generate some by offering your services pro bono or taking your free time to produce some.
- Remember that more is not always exceptional.
Although volume can be the finest and help with self-promotion, it’s also important to try to incorporate some greater and higher profile jobs, rather than just building a portfolio full of the littlest and least lucrative projects.
- If you want to make big money by working with high-paying clients, then you need to show those clients that you can generate the type of work they’re looking for.
Again, consider offering pro bono when you’re prime starting.
- Don’t launch your freelancing career until you’ve generated the products or provided the services you plan to sell.
Having the portfolio shows customers that you’ve done what you’re telling them you can do.
Develop business-savvy skills.
You may be a freelancer, but you should be a businessman or woman.
To successfully derive money as a freelancer and turn it into a career, you need to become familiar with the essentials of operating a business, like taxes, bookkeeping, marketing, etc.
In many cases, these business first steps will take more time than the actual freelance service or product you offer!
- Consider talking to friends (in real life or online) who’ve gained money freelancing about the business ins and outs.
You could also consult various books and online sites about how to start up a business from the ground.
- Although it might seem immature to worry about the “business” of your freelance work, having a business model with goals, deliverables, benchmarks, and so on can help you regulate the scope and scale of your freelancing operation.
A clear business model, and translucent accounts and books, will also show clients that you’re the real deal – an experienced freelancer and not just someone working in their pajamas at home.
Set up an invoicing system.
Part of freelancing as a way to derive real money means setting up a system for charging and receiving payment.
Before you reach out to potential customers and start doing the freelancing work, be ready for it.
It’s a lot easier to keep up with accounting and details along the way, rather than leaving it until later on or even until the dreaded tax season.
Create a financial framework that will make it simple for you to keep organized financial money. Doing this will also help you indicate how much money you’re earning and whether you’re making gains. Consider doing the following:
- Set prices for the services and products you offer. Figure out if you charge a regular rate or per piece/product.
Be ready to explain how you charge for what you’re providing (i.e., the breakdown).
- Create invoice templates. Using word-processing platforms (like Microsoft Excel, for example), design an invoice that has all of the important details (service rendered, cost, payment, addresses of the payee and payer, etc.).
- Establish an accounting plan and examine opening up a business bank account. Often banks have appropriate services and fees for business bank accounts.
- Look into how much you should be weeping and set aside taxes.
Get paying clients.
Once you have a portfolio, it’s time to get out there and start pitching to customers.
Freelancing successfully is a numbers game — the more loyal clients you locate and reach out to, the more likely you are to get work and, most necessary, get paid.
You can begin by drilling into your network of family, friends, and old coworkers. Ask them for referrals; this can help transport in some startup work that can get your freelancing operation off the ground.
However, you’ll also need to make the prime mover and branch out in a lot of cases to earn good money.
When pitching your product or services to new clients, pitch only to those clients who are admissible. And pitch to more of them.
- Try the 10-before-10 rule; pitch to 10 potential customers before 10 in the morning during the work week.
- If you’re still working other jobs, set aside some of your free time to start generating up a client network that you can draw on in the future.
- You should know who your main clients are if you’ve branded yourself properly.
Remember that businesses want to work with freelancers who seem like their services/products were designed just for the demands of those businesses.
The concept of specialization, and modernization, mentioned above, creates this sense.
- You could also try adopting a freelance market. There are few online freelance marketplaces like Elance and oDesk, where you can present your services and look up and pitch to clients.
These can be very beneficial for freelancers just starting.
What are the benefits and limitations of freelancing?
The idea of jumping out of bed, at your accessibility walking briefly to your laptop, and beginning work sure sounds like some Disney land reality.
But nobody ever said that working from home would be effortless and rosy all through.
So, let’s stretch the spotlight back and look at freelancing as a whole.
Regardless of the kind of work, there are definite pros and cons to a career as a freelancer.
Let’s discuss them.
Advantages of freelancing
- You’re your own boss: You pluck your schedule, rates, and which clients or jobs you want to take. If you feel like working in your suit, agbada or indigenous, you can. Why? Because you’re your own boss.
- You get to pay less in taxes: Freelancers can take advantage of fewer tax deductions on income, property, and more.
Since you would not own extensive properties or hire a large workforce, you may not need to explain to FIRS as much as your corporate counterparts would.
- You (can) make more money: Freelancing is a huge risk, a high reward. Your salary is whatever you have expected. It all comes down to how much amount you charge, who are your clients and how often you want to work.
- You have a better work-life balance. Instead of commuting every day, you can simply take an excursion around your neighborhood. When freelancing, you can work whenever you need and live wherever you want.
Disadvantages of freelancing
- You’re the massive boss with big worries: You have to make all the decisions and do all the work, from bookkeeping to executing cash flow to selling your services.
- You have to construct your own benefits, taxes, and accounting: Freelancers don’t have employers to maintain and provide benefits, taxes, and the like. They have to do it themselves with the support of tools or guides, like this one.
- No work, no pay: Sure, you can take three-week holidays, but you won’t make any money while you’re gone. As a freelancer, your time is absolutely literally money. The more you work, the more you earn money.
- Instability can affect your work-life balance: There are a lot of unknowns with freelancing, the greatest being where your next paycheck might come from. This wilfulness can cancel out any work-life balance achieved through freelancing.
According to an Upwork study, the largest drivers to freelance are flexibility, freedom, and earning potential…
…and the largest barriers are income predictability, finding work, and advantages.
If these things are encouraging or demotivating you, you’re not alone.
Next, let us look at some of the most famous and profitable freelance services that you can provide to make money from.